cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/22055566
Google ad on a magazine from 1999
If only they had stuck with that
this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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They definitely abandoned the "do one thing well" philosophy.
And the "don't be evil" philosophy
No they just changed the focus of that to making money.
All these companies start off with altruistic intentions and then become evil. Money and power is helluva drug.
Google set out specifically to not be evil. They even set their company motto as "don't be evil". But then racist fucking psychopath Sundar Pichai was hired as CEO and the motto was scraped for "do the right thing", with the "right thing" always being evil. The new motto is only half spoken. The full motto is truly "do the right thing to obtain money and power at all costs".
Ahh yes the "Do no evil" era.
Notice that era was before they went public. Then it predictably became the "how do we make a profit this quarter?" era.
That's not a Google issue. That's literally each and every public traded corporation. They need to maximize shareholders profits by definition.
Could we stop stock markets and that? I'd love it.
I don't believe anyone decided to step in deeper shit one step at a time, they listed, and from there onwards it's the only possible path. Death by a thousand greedy strokes.
yea, its funny to see xkcd.com/792 from 2010, back when google wasn't evil
I would like to have been a fly on the wall at the meeting when they decided "OK now we're evil, right?"
are we the baddies?
I was in university then and we actually used Yahoo mostly to learn about how to search (back then with boolean operators and other things). I don't recall covering google. I think maybe we had Alta-Vista as well? Of course, Archie, Veronica, etc. were still taught as well.
I saw a post that said the same thing about duckduckgo a couple of days ago
I wonder if this is the actual philosophy Google had at the time or if they always planned to be what they are now.
Don't be evil, you know.
Time to re-integrate portal litter into our vocabularies
If they had ads for themselves, I assume they had income. But they say that their platform doesn't have ads. Where did they get the money to pay their own ads?
Every source on the history of Google seems to ~~implicate~~ imply that their growth and development went:
Using their university resources -> surviving off of investor money -> starting monetization with targeted ads and raking in money
So it seems they had a phase of cornering their market with both public resources and off risky investments, then capitalised on having that exclusive appeal. Seems all too familiar, considering every damn tech startup under the sun now seems to go "trick investors or public funds" -> "corner market" -> "enshittifcation"
If someone else has some better info - go ahead and correct me, but there seems to be no mention of monetisation of Google before their targeted ad rollout.
That doesn't look like an ad, but a section in a (probably) tech magazine where they introduce useful or interesting websites to their readers.